Abstract

The difference between the number of lattice points N(R) that lie in x^2 + y^2 ≤ R^2 and the area of that circle, d(R) = N(R) - πR^2, can be bounded by |d(R)| ≤ KR^θ.
Gauss showed that this holds for θ = 1, but the least value for which it holds is an open problem in number
theory. We have sought numerical evidence by tabulating N(R) up to R ≈ 55,000. From the convex hull bounding log |d(R)| versus log R we obtain the bound θ ≤ 0.575, which is significantly better than the best analytical result θ ≤ 0.6301 ... due to Huxley. The behavior of d(R) is of interest to those studying quantum chaos.